Product Updates

We’ve added workflows throughout the system to better handle returns and refunds both in terms of what gets brought back to you and what you send back to vendors and suppliers, including financial reconciliation and reason codes to better keep track of issues. We also added a workflow in the invoicing section to ensure the refund you issue is accounted for in the system. Our goal is to give you the most complete picture of your shop’s flow as possible and while returns and refunds aren’t a huge component of that, they are a critical one both from a financial standpoint and a quality management perspective.

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At the other end of the manufacturing process, when things are ready to ship out, we’ve added several quality of life updates to the shipping module. You can now add locations to the line items within the shipping interface, sort locations alphabetically, scan the item to open the line item and mark fully shipped, and scan in the lot to pick specifically from that lot.

As with the receiving changes, these were implemented to speed up the process while decreasing the likelihood of any errors creeping.

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We continue to take a deep dive into every single segment of Fulcrum, working to make sure that each section contains the right data and that anyone using it can get the information they need quickly and without digging.

The goal with the new layout of the jobs page was to condense the most critical information together for easy viewing and to connect it to our real-time engine to ensure that the data is as accurate as possible at the exact moment it's needed.

We believe this will give production managers and those looking at job progress a level of insight they haven't had before and with no additional work on their part.

Alex Troesch, our head of product, has once again put together a quick tutorial on what's new and how it all works.

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For high-compliance industries, pulling together all the material certifications for a particular job can be tedious. That’s why we’ve added functionality to tie all the certifications for a job into one pdf, automatically. Certificates will correspond to lots and can be added during receiving or after the fact on the item. When completing a job, the system will look at all the material lots used and automatically pull together all the associated certifications giving you quick traceability.

This will save a lot of time for people doing compliance checks, during audit season, or if a customer has follow-up questions.

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We made a major push to support currency conversions across the entire application. For anyone that needs to account for multiple currencies in their business, we’ve added the ability to set default currencies for your customers and vendors.

Once you set their currency of choice, it will automatically show up on quotes, sales orders, purchase orders, and invoices, but be converted back to your home currency on all reporting and grids. Best of all, we’re converting currency in real-time based on live exchange rates, so you’ll never have to manually calculate it again!

This feature requires some quick setup from your launch team member, so please reach out to them if this interests you.

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The new blanket order feature will streamline the workflow of order entry, production, shipping, and invoicing for large quantity orders with multiple releases. Use the "blanket order" item type on any sales order to add a release schedule and easily keep track of the quantity produced, shipped, and invoiced against the total order quantity.

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While we still believe the future of scheduling is automated and algorithmic, we understand that sometimes a quick manual adjustment to the schedule will help you get your shop back on track. To accommodate those needs, we’ve added the ability to drag and drop objects within the schedule to give you that flexibility, but only for changes in the near-term schedule so as not to create cascading issues later on. You can also cancel jobs, set up new ones, and change operations as necessary, and the rest of the schedule will adapt to whatever changes you make, optimizing the rest of the jobs to keep everything flowing smoothly. The path to every job being on-time has some sudden turns, now you can handle them with ease. This feature requires a bit of setup from your launch team member, so please reach out to them if you're interested in implementing this immediately.

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We’ve built out additional functionality in the rework workflow to allow users to indicate not only that something needs rework, but also what step specifically needs to be redone and how many parts are affected. This automatically creates a new operation for those parts, which allows for better tracking of additional material and labor costs associated with the rework.

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Circumstances change, sometimes on short notice, and the schedule needs to adapt to that. Now, you can make really detailed changes to the schedule, including accounting for modified shift start or end time and maximum equipment capacity adjustments to the day.

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We believe market-based pricing is the best way to maximize income into your shop, but there are certain types of manufacturing that are more closely tied to the cost-plus model of pricing. To make sure we’re not leaving anyone behind, we’ve added functionality for calculating price based on margin inputs. The pricing takes into account the cost to produce an item and calculates a price based on your margin requirement. As the cost changes, the price will change. This method can be used on price breaks, quotes, sales orders, and in the item setup itself.

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We’re now offering clearer workflows for companies that invoice customers before work begins instead of invoicing after work has been completed. To take advantage of this feature, indicate that a deposit is required on the sales order and the amount. This will kick off an invoice for the deposit upfront.

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Not every customer buys in the same way, so we’re making it easier to customize the unit of measurement during the sales process. You can set different units of measure and custom conversions for sales and inventory or set customer-specific units for repeat customers that have consistent needs, whatever best suits your shop’s needs.

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We’ve updated our operation instructions fields to support external hyperlinks to additional documents or instructions from the Job Tracker. We know there's other spots you may be storing key information and can now make sure it's easy to access for your team.

Whether you need in-process data for ISO certification, GMP standards, or any other type of quality management record-keeping, Fulcrum makes that process easy for operators to record and monitor, and easy to compile for later audits.

These quality checkpoints are often exactly what keeps companies from going digital, so this is a huge step forward in digital quality management and we’re excited to be leading in this way.

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It would be great if work flowed from one machine to the next, with no breaks for movement or additional processes between stations, but that’s not exactly how most shops work. So, to account for the realities of moving big pieces between stations or factors like drying time, we’ve added buffer times to operations.

You’ll be able to preset buffer times at the operation level, which means for repeatable times you’ll only have to do it once. However, since some times will change based on part size or other factors, we’re giving you the ability to select whether that time can be overridden. If so, users will have the option to change it during the BOM and routing set up.

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